by Carla Rehse
“C’mon! Enough is enough!” I zigged to the right as the doorbell sounded again, but a shoulder-high stack of botany books zagged faster than I could move.
Trapped between the wall, the botany books, and twelve crumbling copies of Master Ellum’s Magnificence Manifesto on Mirages, I sighed while wiping off the blood on my knuckles. Punching the books had left my hands covered in paper cuts. My shoulder also ached from a humongous encyclopedia on the divination of warts falling on me. Magic could suck my—
The doorbell rang a fifth, more insistent time as if the doorbell ringer was holding down the buzzer to be even more super annoying.
I inched away from the botany stack to get hip bumped by Ellum. I swore his portrait on the cover had started to leer at me.
Follow the instructions, whispered in my mind.
“Hell to the no!” I hissed. “I already got suckered into being the Gatekeeper. What more do you want from me?”
I wasn’t sure who kept nudging me. Neveah, my somewhat dead and not very friendly training angel, was my best guess. It certainly seemed like something she would do.
“Everly Ivona Popa?” yelled the only being who would call me by my full name.
I edged to the left, but the botany books blocked me. “Sebastian! Hel—”
A flash of light left my eyes watering. Sebastian’s head and the tips of his translucent wings peered over the stack. “These belong in the library.”
The Accidental Archivist
Book II of
The Accidental Midlife Trilogy
coming fall 2021
